"Why aren't you coming home to serve the new China, T. D.?" He answered with a knowing smile, "I don't want to have my brains washed by others." As I didn't know how brains could be washed, I did not at the time find the idea very daunting.[4]

Not long after his return, however, Wu got his first taste of what "brain washing" could mean, in the form of enforced "thought reform" sessions.

In 1952, after one year at Yenching University, Wu was transferred to Nankai University, Tianjin, where he met his wife, Li Yikai. The couple married in 1954. During the 1955 Campaign to Uproot Hidden Counterrevolutionaries Wu was suspected of having been a Nationalist spy, or of still being an American spy, and he was denounced as the number-one "hidden counterrevolutionary" at Nankai University. In 1957, during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, he was one of the intellectuals who - despite initial misgivings - spoke up for freedom of speech. This led to his formal denouncement as an "ultra-rightist" during the Anti-Rightist campaign of September 1957, and in the spring of 1958 he was sent to a state prison farm in Heilongjiang for "corrective education through hard labor". In 1961, during the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, he was released from prison.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) Wu and his family were again persecuted, as were so many other intellectuals and their families.

In 1980 he was rehabilitated, and he resumed his former teaching post at the Institute of International Relations. He published some elegant essays and translations in The World of English, a Beijing-based journal. In early 1988, he published his English translation of Fang Lizhi's essay "Capri Revisited（重访卡普里）" in The World of English（英语世界）.

^The c.v. at http://www.boxun.com/hero/wunk/1_1.shtml mentions 1921 as birth year, but this must be a typo, for at [1] Wu himself writes: 我是土生土長的揚州人，一九二零年出生在彩衣街老宅 "I am a born and bred Yangzhou man, born in 1920 in our good old house at Caiyi Road."